Archive for March, 2010

Pi Robot from our forums has a pretty awesome project posted up and watching it progress has been awe inspiring to say the least. Uncanny Valley came to mind watching Peppy grasp for his various colored balloons; it honestly looks like a small child grasping for a toy. Great stuff! Looks like Pepe was build using a gaggle of various parts including some AX-12+ servos and apparently uses Visual C# 2005 Express and Roborealm on the software side of things.

Anyone who’s ever tried painting their Bioloid brackets knows that it’s near impossible to get the colors to not flake and peel, but these are not painted! The actual plastic color has been changed and is resistant to scratching. Not all the Bioloid frame pieces are available in dyed colors due to their composition being different. To specify these different colors is simple; just click on the drop down menu on the product page of each bracket and select the wanted color!

This is the long anticipated Bioloid Premium Upgrade Kit! Note: These are limited edition with VERY few units in stock. Availability past this batch is unknown as of yet, pending announcement from Robotis.

This Upgrade Kit upgrades your existing Bioloid Comprehensive Kit to the Premium Humanoid Robot. It contains essentially the same components as the full Premium Kit, except for the 18x AX-12 Servos.

How cool! With these new Lego NXT compatible Linear Actuators you can easily add strong linear motion to your next Lego Mindstorms project. We now offer both 50mm and 100mm varieties.

Time to expand your building power with your Lego Mindstorms®. You must be tired of rotating things all day with regular old motors. It’s time to start moving things bach and forth, up and down, in and out! Like a REAL engineer. Firgelli actuators will make you the coolest kid on the block for certain.

Lego Mindstorm®, Power Functions®, and Technic® compatible Linear Actuators. These linear actuators are self contained units which include an electric motor. They will push up to 25N and move at 12mm/s unloaded.

For use with your NXT® Brick you will need a standard NXT® connection cable to connect it in place of one of the Mindstorm® Servos, and you will need to download the Firgelli L12-NXT Block here.

For manual use with Lego Power Functions® you will require the Cable-NXT-PF available on this site. For manual use with older Lego Technic® style battery packs you will require the Cable-NXT-Technic available on this site.

Please note: The Lego Group does not endorse these products. Lego®, NXT®, Mindstorms®, Technic® and Power Functions® are trademarks of The Lego Group.

It’s that time of year again! We’ve gone through the piles of various robot parts accumulated over the last year as well as products we’re moving out of our catalog to make room for new stuff, and discounted it heavily! Builders, Tinkerers, and Deal-Hunters rejoice, we’ve cut prices to move this stuff out the door quickly. Quantities are limited and if this sale is anything like last year, it will go quick, so don’t wait long. Everything from servos to beginner robot kits to wheels to chargers to batteries and much, much more! Stop by and check out all the savings for yourself in our Garage Sale section!

Giger’s upgrades got finalized late Sunday night and I had a bit of time to sit down and start to work on the walking gaits (from scratch). The EX-106+ is roughly 4x more precise than all previous Dynamixels, so the positional values do not translate over well when upgrading from a previous model. What does that mean? It was far simpler to just start over rather than try to scale the values step by step. All new custom brackets used in the legs and feet, as well as new elbow/shoulder brackets and arm extensions. Brackets were designed in Autodesk Inventor 2008 and machined by Rapid Sheet Metal. It’s worth mentioning that all of the custom, as well as the stock, brackets and frames that are used in Giger’s arms and legs are available in our store on our Dynamixel Servo & Bracket page! Even his ankles/hip joints or his entire legs!

A lot of projects tend to only show updates after many dozens and/or hundreds of hours of progress, but I like to show the little steps as I feel it gives one a better view of the evolution of a project and what goes into making a robot work. Keep in mind; I have this gait tuned to a very slow rate so that I can work on the balance and COG shifting correctly, it can then be sped up to a more realistic, useful speed. Here’s a short video of my initial walking gait progress (about 2 hours of programming work so far) on Giger 2.0: